Letter to QUNO 1.5

Letter to QUNO from Meeting for Worship for Ukraine  Draft 1.5

Dear Friends

This correspondence is addressed to you on behalf of the undersigned participants in the Daily International Friends Meeting for Worship for Peace who are in Unity with this request. The undersigned have been regular participants in the daily online Meeting for Worship out of concern for the tragic situation in Ukraine. 

After discussion and consideration, we wish to draw to your attention a simple measure which would provide a continuing and universal incentive for every Government to improve its human rights (HR) performance, and which therefore would to some extent reduce the probability of similar tragedies in years to come.

This is that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, (OHCHR) should publish annually the contents of its Universal Human Rights Index in a quantified and tabular form, providing an accessible listing which would summarise the HR performance in the previous year of all Governments, give their relative position in the range of governmental performance, and give an indication of whether their performance is static, improving or worsening.

This would amount to a modest development of the presentation of the Universal Human Rights Index data already present in the UN website.

The effect of this measure will be to take the HR data out of the recesses of the UN website, known only to students of international politics, simplify it, and bring it forward into the public domain, so that anyone considering travelling to, or doing business with, a particular country, will be able to form a reasonably accurate impression of its HR performance at a glance, with the facility of digging deeper into the data as necessary.

Please see the Appendix to this letter where we present images from the Our World in Data website to give an idea of how the UN data could be presented.

We therefore recommend this measure to QUNO for your consideration. We recognise that you will need to explore and weigh up and test the proposal in detail and we would be happy to discuss this matter with you.

With grateful recognition of your valuable work

 

In friendship

 

(Signed)…………….

  

Letter to QUNO – APPENDIX

These screenshots are taken from tabular data on the Our World in Data website 

https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights > All our charts on Human Rights > Human rights protection, 2019 > Table. 

The scores displayed there capture the extent to which citizens' physical integrity is protected from government killings, torture, political imprisonments, extrajudicial executions, mass killings and disappearances. Higher scores mean fewer such abuses.  Source: Bastian Herre and Max Roser (2016) - "Human Rights". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights' [Online Resource]

Screenshot of the countries with the best scores:

And these are the countries with the lowest scores:

The live table allows us to scroll through the entire rankings.

This gives an indication of how countries would appear on the UN website. The UN would be able to design its own criteria and parameters.